User Support Forum

Hello Everyone,

We came aboard PC+ in Aug 2004. We have V9. Most of our PCs use Windows 2000 on a network. Some of them use Windows 98). We can burn CD. I am thinking of getting a thumb drive to use on Sunday so that we can have an off-site backup. (We will continue to backup using CD RW).

I am an accountant who is slightly tech. oriented. (I do have a tech person availible, but I need to be more functional without him).

I have a few questions.

• 1) How can I be sure that my backups work? How do you test them without risking good data on your network?
  3) What is the best backup routine. (How many disks / cd to use. How often to backup, etc).

Your insight & experience would be very helphful.

Thanks Much,
Tom

SBCTrustee wrote:Hello Everyone,

We came aboard PC+ in Aug 2004. We have V9. Most of our PCs use Windows 2000 on a network. Some of them use Windows 98). We can burn CD. I am thinking of getting a thumb drive to use on Sunday so that we can have an off-site backup. (We will continue to backup using CD RW).

I am an accountant who is slightly tech. oriented. (I do have a tech person availible, but I need to be more functional without him).

I have a few questions.

• 1) How can I be sure that my backups work? How do you test them without risking good data on your network?
  3) What is the best backup routine. (How many disks / cd to use. How often to backup, etc).

Your insight & experience would be very helphful.

Thanks Much,
Tom

Tom,

the backups created by PC+ are basically a ZIP file. The system ZIPs up the data files, and puts them in a ZIP archive. If you really want to test the archive, you can use the verify function which checks the files against the archive checksums to insure the file is still intact.

This is how we backup here:

1. Weekly, I do a full backup to a network storage location, so its available on the network if necessary.
2. I then go home, login to the server through GoToMyPC, and transfer a copy of that file to my home computer, where I put it on a removable ZIP drive. You can do this using the removable thumb drive.
3. I also add that backup to a CD-RW disk, and store that in my household safe.

As you can see, we have a few redundancies here, not to mention a redundant set of mirrored drives in the server, So if we lose one drive, we have the other to continue with .

Thanks Neil,

I will basically follow your lead!!

Tom